This is about the level of reading Americans are comfortable with.
Grove Press preceded this trash and called them literate, articulate, sexually and morally degrading novels which have contributed to our "culture" and The Decline and Fall of The American Empire.

As for these so called intellectual writers with carnal appetites: These were the dregs of humanity.

“James Joyce” by Gordon Bowker finds Joyce’s letters to Nora “pornographic.” Joyce “had acquired a taste for extreme forms of sexual debauchery, including excremental fetishes and sadomasochistic practices and he notes his girlfriend Nora’s “eagerness to share in his more deviant sexual fantasies.”

Author of “The Beauty Myth,” Naomi Wolf, who divorced David Shipley (former editor of The New York Times Op-Ed), confessed that Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom sexually harassed her for 20 years.

Read the tragically sad case of Simone de Beauvoir and her "open" relationship with the selfish, unfeeling Jean Paul Sartre to realize the deep pain he caused her with his other lovers.

When someone asked her if her subjugation to Jean-Paul Sartre in her personal life was at odds with her feminist theories: “Well, I just don’t give a d-mn ... I’m sorry to disappoint all the feminists, but you can say it’s too bad so many of them live only in theory instead of in real life.”

These so-called intellectuals were themselves sadomasochists like the Marquis de Sade who thrilled to the ultimate "soul kiss" with the lovers regurgitating into each others gullets.

This is what Richard Seaver imported and promoted and fawned over—an ideology not just books. The writers helped make perversion acceptable and the adulterer the hero and the wronged spouse the chumps.

The biggest chumps are the ones who continue to read this perverted drivel under the guise of being "topical."

You know what men will be demanding of women in the future—simply because they know women are reading S&M novels.